unleash is a medium-sized commandline utility that tries to ease releasing software, specifically Python libraries and programs. It is currently barely documented and tailored to my workflow. Use at your own risk.

Simply do:

unleash create-release

This will:

• Read the version currently in master and calculate the appropriate release version (i.e. 0.3.4.dev1 becomes 0.3.4).
• Create a new commit, in which setup.py and packagename/__init__.py have had their version strings updated to the new version.
• Check out the commit in a temporary directory, alongside a clean virtualenv.
• Check if the documentation, if present, can be built correctly.
• Generate an sdist package from the checked out commit and see if it cleanly installs inside the virtualenv.
• Runs unittests inside the virtualenv.
• If everything goes well, removes the temporary checkouts/virtualenvs and tags the commit with the new version.
• Creates a new commit on master with a version bump for the next release.

Git operations are not done on the working copy, but directly using dulwich, avoiding snafu's that plague other forms of scripting releases. The only actual call to the git-executable is when pushing a tag.

Creating a release can be followed up with something like:

unleash publish -s code

This will:

• Check out the latest version tag into a temporary directory.
• Build a source package.
• Upload and sign it (python setup.py sdist -s -i code).
• Upload the documentation, if present, to pythonhosted.org (PyPI).
• Push the associated git tag to origin.
• Clean up the temporary directory.